The Altai Chronicles: Tablets of Light

At the invitation of angelic Light Beings, Carol Hiltner and her adult daughter Aimee set off on the journey of their lives—a mystical quest on the other side of the planet. Traveling west, they walked the Great Wall of China, rode Mongolian geldings, swam in Lake Baikal, and took the Trans-Siberian Railway on to Novosibirsk, the jumping-off point to the Altai Mountains.

But they didn’t know until they arrived that approaching sacred Mount Belukha required a 60-mile wilderness trek—with a mountain guide who spoke no English. Psychics in Seattle had told Carol that she would meet a “special person” and find a dozen stones on the trail that were keys to mystical information. But nothing was obvious and Carol left Altai fearing that she had failed on all counts, including a romantic encounter with the mountain guide. Upon arriving in Moscow, however, Carol experienced a vivid vision of “opening the door” that rocked her world. And back home in Seattle, she experienced a miraculous healing of an old shoulder injury.
Having still not found or translated the Tablets of Light, Carol accepted the help of an acquaintance from the Altai trek—a young philosophy professor—to revisit Moscow and Novosibirsk that autumn. Was he the “special person”? Or was the mountain guide?

The next summer, Carol joined this professor, his wife, and another couple to trek again in Altai, for a month. Still seeking the Tablets of Light, Carol was given a helmet of light by the Greek pantheon in a lucid dream. Two days later, Carol survived lightning. Unstated expectations and a serious shortage of food shattered the group accord.

Meanwhile, Carol had deduced that, to find the Tablets, she had to cross the threshold of the mystical door she’d opened the previous summer—into an altered state—and she needed the mountain guide’s tantric sexual energy to do it. She returned to Moscow with the other couple, who found her an empty apartment in which she could spend a month writing this book and which the mountain guide agreed to visit. At the end of a difficult week together, he did propel her through the door, where she discovered that the translation of the Tablets was her, or anyone’s, vital force expressing itself in the tumult and polarities of life.